When traffic goes up, efficiency goes down.

It’s as universal as it is frustrating.

But … what if you didn’t have to choose?

That’s what Original Grain pulled off over the last 12 months — increased traffic and CVR, AOV + profit per session.

📊 Nate Lagos with three tactics to lift the metrics that matter

😶 Mike Beckham shares his apolitical take on tariffs & trade

💰 Connor MacDonald invites you to “experience” profitability

Plus, this week’s five biggest headlines in consumer news with executive summaries.

Nate Lagos Original Grain, VP Marketing

Three Profitable & Proven Tactics, Just Like the Marketers Who Use Them

Over the last year, we’ve more than 2X’d site traffic while increasing our conversion rate, AOV, and profit per session.

That doesn’t happen by accident. In fact, that’s not supposed to happen at all.

A huge chunk of Original Grain’s wins came from three tactics.

1. Cost-to-Value Principle
2. Headline-Identity Formula
3. Creative-Testing Strategy

This is the exact framework we’ve been using to crush it. Here’s how to make it work for your brand, too.

 1. Cost-to-Value Principle 

My friend Sarah Levinger, who appeared on last week’s Operators Podcast, got the ball rolling on this first tactic.

Months ago, she dropped a psychological study on me that said:

Picture it. Your product, with every COG laid out for people to see. My brain started racing. We obviously all need margin. But hard costs are only part of that.

Take our whiskey barrel collection …

If I tell you I sell watches made out of wood — one of the cheapest, most renewable resources on earth — you’re going to think that $300–$600 is a lot of money.

You’d assume cheaper wood watches exist. And you’d be right.

So that’s not what we tell people.

Before we buy the wood, an oak tree has to be cut down, transported, built into a barrel, transported again, filled at a distillery, and aged for a decade or two.

Then, I checked the actual growing time. Turns out, oak trees typically need 70 to 100 years before they’re ready to be cut down and made into whiskey barrels.

Like that, a killer value proposition was born.

That headline + copy increased conversions 30% and profit per session 28% on our highest traffic landing page.

Why? Because after I force you to think about how someone’s great-great-grandfather planted a tree in the late 1800s, it lived through the Great Depression and two World Wars, was crafted into a barrel, was aged with whiskey, was emptied, was reclaimed by us, and meticulously inlaid into a watch …

$300–$600 bucks feels like a steal. It’s a miracle we’re able to offer it for that price!

Plus, since we compete in an industry where our competitors really do have a hundred years of history, this is our way of embedding heritage into a brand that’s only 12 years old.

Even if your products aren’t made from oak trees, you can still do this. You can talk about how long it took to develop or perfect your design. You can talk about the emotional, physical, or mental costs that inspired it.

If you have bad margins, you can talk about the hard costs of materials + production — literally itemize them.

This kind of messaging becomes even more important when external factors drive up your costs. It helps customers understand why you’re priced the way you are without feeling like they’re getting ripped off.

But that’s only the first tactic …

 2. Headline-Identity Formula 

Counting the cost isn’t the only way to communicate value. You can also make your products appear more valuable by comparing them to your customers. How? Anchoring your value in the values they aspire to — their identities.

I already showed you two examples. Did you catch them?

On the homepage: “Rugged & Unique Like the Men Who Wear Them.” On the whiskey barrel lander: “Watches as Smooth & Unique as The Men Who Wear Them.”

The very first lines in our welcome flow read: “Hey! If you’re looking for watches that are as unique, rugged, and dependable as the men who wear ‘em, you’ve come to the right place!”

I use it for my podcast: “The Tactical and Practical podcast is smart and efficient, just like the marketers who listen to it.” And, of course, for the title of this piece.

I’ve been working with this headline formula for years, but only talking about it over the last 18 months. Since then, a ton of eight and nine-figure brands have applied it.

HexClad ran a Father’s Day campaign where its knives were “Sharp and to the point 🔪 Just like Dad.” Ridge positions itself as tools “that work as hard as you do.” Pela Case does it, “Bold, brave, and totally unapologetic — just like you.”

I’ve even seen it in copy from the billion-dollar brand Jack Daniels: “Bold and complex. Like those who enjoy it.”

It’s everywhere … once you start looking.

Do you see the magic behind why so many brands are using these headlines?

We’re taking positive attributes that our customers want to identify with and using them as adjectives to highlight similarities between them and our products.

When you do that, you give people a lane to solidify themselves in an aspirational view they already have. People love it because they want to be smooth, unique, rugged, dependable, reliable, bold, complex.

My friend Bart from Dad Gang did a great version of this.

He changed one of his top ads from saying, “We make the best hats for dads” to “We make the best hats for the best dads.” To his target demo, being the best dad is the highest honor they can achieve. Subtle change; massive difference.

 3. Creative-Testing Strategy 

Think about all the positive attributes that describe both your customer and your product. I usually do this with ChatGPT. Prompt it with, “Write 100 possible adjectives that you could use to describe my product.”

Pick a few of your favorites. Enter them into this formula:

You’re not gonna hit a home run the first time. We’ve tested countless other adjectives and combinations.

• Classic and storied
• Compelling and unique
• Bold and full of character

Here’s the key part that most people miss …

Don’t test it in your ad account first.

That’s an expensive and unreliable mistake.

Instead, we test everything on our website first by running simple A/B tests with a platform like Intelligems and making sure to hit statistical significance. Why? Because that way we know whether the new angle can beat our current best performer.

If there’s a piece of content or a headline or a block of copy on our website that I can prove drives conversions, putting that image, video, headline, or copy into a Facebook ad gives us a ridiculous hit rate.

When we have a winner, we implement it across our entire funnel — ads, email flows, SMS, all of it.

Figuring out these little unlocks that have huge impacts on performance is the best part of my job. It’s the most fun. It’s the most meaningful. I’m not kidding you. This isn’t some theory, fancy, high-level bullshit.

This is the stuff that’s going to put more dollars in your pocket.

Damn Good Value, Just Like Your Customers Want

If you take anything away from these tactics, I want you to do something on your website that communicates the value of your product versus the price.

You can make it monetary — hard costs. You can do what we do, where you talk about the time and the history that went into crafting whatever it is you sell. You can load up your headlines with exactly why your customers are special and how your product is the perfect fit for their identities.

However you do it, you have to make people feel your value. Test it on your site. Take the winners into your ad account and everywhere else in your funnel.

We better have a damn good reason for shoppers to take out their wallets. Especially now … when those wallets are lighter and tighter than ever.

Nate Lagos is VP of Marketing at Original Grain, with a wholesale account at Red Bull. Follow him on X (Twitter) or LinkedIn for more practical + tactical ecommerce strategies — and to learn the truth about the moon landing.

THE FEED

​The Tariff Emergency Episode​

​From Product Drops to Post-Purchase Plays: Email Marketing with Karly Craig​

​Financial Strategies for Uncertain Times​

Connor MacDonald CMO, Ridge

How to Create Profitable Customer Experiences: Live Panel

Our Dir. of CX, Megan Johns, is speaking at an online panel this week. It’s not only Ridge that’ll be there; so will …

• Finance Operator Drew Fallon
• Friend of the podcast, Richpanel
• HexClad’s Head of Support
• Simple Modern’s CX Manager
• Plus, like 20 other speakers

I’ve done them before! They always have a good flow and tons of lessons. Here’s the link if you want to check it out.

Mike Beckham CEO, Simple Modern

On Tariffs and Trade: My Apolitical Take

I’ve been asked my opinion on the current tariffs several times in the past ten days. My belief is simple — every nation should create incentives and laws that promote fair competition.

Those last two words are the most important. So I want to focus on them: (1) competition and (2) fair.

First, the world benefits from competition.

If you watched the men’s track and field 100m at the Paris Olympics last summer, it was a perfect example of how performance rises to the level of competition. The fifth-place finisher’s time in 2024 would have won the gold in 2020. Sports teach us that more competition leads to better performance.

In business, it’s the same. Except that competition leads to better performance and better products.

Capitalism is flawed, but it is the best system we have for incentivizing and inspiring competition.

When you develop a better mousetrap, you get to reap the rewards. We can debate how much financial reward the winners should keep, but capitalism highly incentivizes that process.

For every product breakthrough, there will be 10 imitations that hit the market. When one firm figures out a more efficient way to run its business, others quickly imitate.

This is a good thing!

The drumbeat of competition is the reason we are defeating poverty worldwide. Only 100 years ago, the average household did not have indoor plumbing — let alone a radio or air conditioning. If you are reading this, you’re likely doing it on a smartphone that is more powerful than all the world’s computing power combined in 1960.

This is all possible because of competition.

Competition forces you to get better every day. It ruthlessly eliminates companies that do not serve the customer effectively. You can always tell when some monopolistic or government barrier protects a business. They always have terrible customer service because they don’t have to compete.

Trade is one of the primary tools of competition. It is the fuel that allows us to compete at a higher level because it expands the number of people competing. An Olympics with athletes from two countries would never be as high-quality or entertaining as one with athletes worldwide.

Eliminating trade is a galaxy-level bad idea. Trade is why we have thrived as a country. We want to encourage free trade.

Second, trade must be fair.

Because of the huge financial incentives that capitalism creates, people will do anything to win. People will break the rules.

Sometimes the rules are broken by countries. It doesn’t matter if a country is a part of the World Trade Organization when it cheats. It is often a low-risk, high-reward behavior for a country to cheat in trade. Every government is incentivized to look out for only its citizens. You must have international rules and structures that force them to play fair, or they will cheat in any way that benefits their citizens and local companies.

This form of cheating has been rampant over the past few decades. If you cheat long enough, you gain a reputation, and some people don’t want to do business with you anymore. Right or wrong, that is the perception that many Americans have developed about several foreign countries. This isn’t a reflection on the people in those countries. It’s the result of bad rules and worse enforcement.

Sometimes, it’s individuals who break the rules. I have been involved with ecommerce for 15 years and have sold around $2B worth of products during that time.

I have witnessed hundreds of ways that ecommerce sellers break rules to create an edge. This is rampant in the Amazon marketplace, where I’ve seen sellers:

• Label other products as pesticides
• Attack listings with one-star reviews
• Lie to avoid tariffs on imported goods
• Lie about where they make products
• Lie about their company’s location
• Lie to flatout avoid paying their taxes

Regardless of what rules are in place, you will get rampant cheating if they are not enforced. Fair or not, the reputation of foreign ecommerce sellers in our community is that they frequently break the rules. Even worse, it appears that Amazon and others often turn a blind eye because the rule-breaking allows products to be sold at cheaper prices.

The last two weeks have been a dumpster fire for small businesses that rely on trade to serve customers. I am hopeful that in the weeks ahead, our political and corporate leaders can chart a new course for an age of free and fair trade.

If we can do it, we will all be amazed by the prosperity it brings.

The Trends

Curated by the editor of CPG Wire, this week’s five biggest headlines in consumer news — it’s not all doom + gloom.

1. Prada Buys Versace for $1.38B: Reuters​

112-year-old luxury fashion house Prada has struck a deal to acquire Versace from Capri Holdings. According to sources, both companies were willing to “swallow a bunch of geopolitical risk.”

Having operated a loss in recent quarters, Versace’s price represents a significant discount from the $2.1 billion that Capri Holdings (formerly Michael Kors) paid when it acquired Versace in 2018. Prada is financing the transaction with €1.5 billion in new debt and expects the deal to close in the second half of 2025.

2. Harry’s Inc Becomes Mammoth Brands: Retail Dive​

Harry’s, the fast-growing personal care company that Edgewell acquired in 2019, is rebranding as Mammoth Brands in order to reflect its growing portfolio of brands. In addition to its namesake personal care brand, Mammoth also owns Flamingo, Lume, and Mando. The combined company generated $835M in revenue and nearly $100M in adjusted EBITDA in 2024.

3. Starday Foods Nabs $11M Series A: Business Wire​

Starday Foods, an AI-driven food innovation company, raised $11M in equity and debt funding. Slow Ventures and Equal Ventures co-led the $8M equity investment, while Silicon Valley Bank provided the $3M credit facility.

Starday uses AI to identify unmet consumer needs in the marketplace, then develops products and a corresponding brand to take to retail. Thus far, it’s launched four food brands.

4. Aubrey Marcus Returns: Korrect​

Aubrey Marcus, the founder of Onnit, is returning to the supplement space with Korrect, a paraxanthine-based energy brand. Paraxanthine is a caffeine metabolite that provides a boost of energy without the crash. Aubrey Marcus founded Onnit in 2010 and sold it to Unilever for an undisclosed sum in 2021.

5. Brynwood Partners Sells Harvest Hill: Food & Drink International​

Brynwood Partners is selling Harvest Hill Beverage Company to Castillo Hermanos, a Guatemalan conglomerate, for $1.5B. Harvest Hill was established in 2014 when Brynwood purchased Juicy Juice from Nestle USA. It has since acquired a number of other beverage brands like SunnyD, Little Hugs, and Fruit2O.

The move will enable Castillo Hermanos to expand its presence in the US and circumvent tariffs by leveraging Harvest Hill’s manufacturing facilities.

Huge thanks + massive apology to the hundreds of you who requested access to last week’s Google Doc.

I think I replied to everyone with the “Make a copy” link. If I missed you, here it is ↓

​Operators on Tariffs & DTC in 2025​

• Mehtab’s 10 proven pricing tactics
• Matt on how small brands can win
• Mike’s parable on mowing + wartime
• Sean Frank’s state of DTC in 2025

Oh, and if you made it this far …

You’re in for a special treat next Monday. The “Prince of Purses” himself — Portland Leather Goods’ CMO, MacCoy Merkley — will finally share his long-foretold contribution!

Evidently, he had more important things on his priorities list than writing about being a nine-figure, DTC-to-omnichannel juggernaut (like welcoming his second baby).

With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff 🤓 Executive Editor

Disclaimer: Special thanks to Richpanel for sponsoring the Marketing Operators.

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